 Hey everybody, my name is Dr. Patrick Anderson and I'm an assistant professor of philosophy in the Department of Humanities at Central State University. For those who might not be familiar with us, Central State University is a small state HBCU in central Ohio and today I'll be talking to you about open education and intra-group diversity. And as the subtitle of my talk suggests, we're going to do a case study in teaching black thought. For the purpose of our presentation here, we can use the terms Africana philosophy and black intellectual history interchangeably for the sake of ease. The idea being that what we want to do is study historically the cultivation and development of this tradition of thought. And before we get going, I just want to give a shout out to the Kent Wood Branch of the Kent District Library in Grand Rapids, Michigan for giving me this awesome conference room space to be able to sit and work on this and record this video for everyone. So yeah, let's get going. Just briefly to introduce the concept of Africana philosophy and the field at its practice, there's three basic branches the way that is practiced in North America. There's African philosophy, Afro-Caribbean philosophy and African-American philosophy. And as you might guess, these different sub fields within this larger field are geographically organized and this doesn't mean that they aren't also organized the way that classical philosophy usually is metaphysics, epistemology and value theory like ethics and aesthetics. All of those fields are represented in these three different traditions, but the geographical part is emphasized just because it is a diasporic tradition in this way. And today in this presentation, most of the examples I'll be giving is from African-American philosophy just to kind of introduce things that will be familiar to most participants here. And the main concept that I'd like to introduce in this talk is intergroup diversity versus intragroup diversity. Now when I say intergroup diversity, this means what we normally mean when we just say the word diversity. And as a stipulative definition for our conversation today, we can say that this is the inclusion of individuals from a variety of different social or cultural groups for the purpose of ensuring representation of those groups. The purpose of intergroup diversity is to make sure as many different groups, however that is going to be defined in a particular context, can be represented as many different groups as possible. Intragroup diversity, by contrast, is the inclusion of at least two or more members from the same social or cultural group, however that may be defined, for the purpose of teaching debates internal to that group. The purpose of intragroup diversity is different than the purpose of intergroup diversity. The purpose of intragroup diversity is to make sure that different intellectual paradigms or positions from within that group actually get shared and this way, especially in a teaching context, students can understand some of the debates that happen between individuals within the same group. So moving forward, we have a few sections that I'd like to go through. The first is just introducing the three principles of intragroup diversity. The second is to provide some examples from my own syllabi and I just have some screenshots of some things I've done in the past that I think can give examples to illustrate what intragroup diversity means in the context of a syllabus. And then finally, connect this back to OERs, although I should have this caveat right here because this qualification right out in the beginning, there's not really a lot of OER materials in Africana philosophy or black intellectual history. So most of what I'm going to talk about today are going to be things that are public domain and otherwise available cost-free online. So that'll be some of the examples there. So with that, we'll get to these three sections and we'll get going. The term intragroup diversity is a term that as far as I'm aware that I have coined this term and I came up with this term to describe something that I was trying to achieve in my teaching that I didn't see a word for anywhere else because what I wanted to do was avoid tokenism. I didn't want to teach introduction to philosophy and go through Plato and Aristotle all the way up to Kant or Nietzsche or the 20th century and then be like, oh, and here's W. E.B. Du Bois or here's Franz Fanon or here's Anna Julia Cooper. There is your black thinker for this class. I wanted to figure out a way to show students that black thinkers are debating each other without actually having to reference Western European philosophy, white philosophy, however we might want to designate that. And so the three basic principles of this approach, the way that I've tried to cultivate it over the years are as follows. First, the syllabus should include at least two or more thinkers with a fundamental intellectual or philosophical disagreement. This disagreement has to be about the basic nature of a problem or the basic, whether this is something we're trying to diagnose or the basic nature of a solution to a problem. In other words, that this is the best approach exclusive to this other approach. And here's why. Second, diversity of thought is the basis for selection, not diversity of identity categories. One way to think about this is to say that intersectionality is different than intragroup diversity. They can be used the same. And in fact, they are not mutually exclusive. So the idea here isn't that intragroup diversity is the alternative, the replacement for an intersectional approach, if this is something that you already are striving to practice, but that the basis of inclusion be different. So for example, it's not that if you have a black man on the syllabus that you should also have a black woman, that would be a more intersectional approach. This would be if you have somebody that makes a claim or has a position on a particular pressing matter or issue, some metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, aesthetic question, then you have another thinker from that same, that same group without reference to their identity necessarily, who takes a completely different approach to that problem. And they may have a different identity categories, they may have different intersections and they may not. And all of this is meant to say is that you can use intragroup diversity and intersectionality without using one or the other, and you can also use them both at the same time. So this is just giving us a new way of diversifying. And number three, the purpose for selecting, including the thinkers from the relevant group is to provide an autonomous space for the members of that group to debate ideas outside the group's relation to other groups. So one problem in philosophy is what Tommy Curry has called epistemic convergence. And this is when black thinkers are included in the philosophical canon, only on the basis of the relationships to already established white or European philosophers. And so you can see this pattern if you say, oh, we're going to teach Marx, Karl Marx, and then we'll teach Du Bois, or we're going to teach Hegel, and then we're going to teach Du Bois, or we're going to teach William James, and we're going to teach Du Bois. And what this is trying to do is take Du Bois and put it into a Hegelian or Marxist or pragmatist kind of tradition that maybe some of those thinkers missed out on something like thinking about race. And so Du Bois becomes the extension, the corrective for those traditions of Western philosophy. But what this approach doesn't do is determine the ways that Du Bois was having debates with other black intellectuals of his time, whether this be Anna Julia Cooper, or Booker T. Washington, or Alexander Crumel, or William H. Ferris, or Marcus Garvey, and so on. Du Bois was also having debates with these other black thinkers. And so the purpose of intro group diversity is to highlight those debates rather than the kind of epistemic convergence approach that would say that black thinkers are important only to the extent that they are relevant to Western philosophy. So with those three principles, then let me show a few examples of how I've tried to use this in my own courses that I've taught over the years. So for this section, I've got just a series of screenshots from syllabi that I've used just so I can illustrate what I mean here. In this first example, we're taking from an introduction to philosophy class that I taught while I was a graduate student at Texas A&M University. And the approach I took to this class was not the traditional introduction to philosophy where you go through the history of Western philosophy. Instead, the approach I took was philosophy in American society. And that was the theme of the course. So in one section of the class, we looked at black intellectual responses to racism and slavery in the antebellum period of American history. And so in this context, we can see that there are different proposed responses on the parts of black individuals. David Walker says that violence is a perfectly legitimate response to slavery. Martin Delaney advocated emigration that free black people and any escaped slaves could work together to leave the United States or to move to somewhere where black people constitute the majority of the citizenry. And finally, you have Frederick Douglass, who advocates a kind of political assimilation into the United States by extending the principles of the Constitution to protect everybody regardless of race or heritage. And in this particular component of the class, the thing that we're highlighting, the place that intro group diversity comes in, is that these are all different solutions to the problem of slavery. And so these black intellectuals do not agree on the best path forward. Later on in the class, we studied Jim Crow segregation. And here, it's not so much the diversity of solutions that are offered, but the different approaches to diagnosing the problem of segregation and lynching. So we did hear in this class from Henry McNeil Turner and Ida B. Wells Barnett on the legal foundations for civil rights retrenchment and the way that extra legal violence in the form of lynching was perpetrated. Then we read a short essay from Richard Wright that he gives a sort of existential account. He's doing a kind of phenomenology of what does it mean to learn the values of Jim Crow while you live in that kind of society. And then we saw W. E. B. Du Bois' Advocation. And then we saw W. E. B. Du Bois' Advocacy of the Talented Tenth being the key to racial uplift. And we read T. Thomas Fortune's Black and White, a few chapters from that where he advocates the cultivation of class consciousness. He takes a political economy approach to the problem. And so the diversity here is the diversity of different ways of diagnosing the problems that black Americans faced at that particular time in American history. And then finally, we moved ahead to civil rights where we heard from a few different thinkers here, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the intellectuals of the Black Panther Party. And again, this is where solutions are the diversity because there are different approaches that are being advocated in this particular historical time and place. Of course, King advocates nonviolence, Malcolm X advocates self-defense, and the Black Panthers advocate self-determinism for the Black community as a whole. And again, these are just different possible solutions or different paths forward to correct the problems that all of them are trying to diagnose. And so this particular class gives us a few examples of how solutions, diagnostic, philosophical methodologies can all be the basis for intragroup diversity because these are different intellectual paradigms or philosophical paradigms that are being used by a variety of black thinkers to address these situations. One more example I would like to give comes in the form of my feminist philosophy class that I taught at Grand Valley State several years ago when I was teaching philosophy there. And here we did a whole component of the class on Africana theories of gender. Notice that in this particular case, this section of the class is not called intersectionality. Intersectionality is one theory that black women have put forward. But there's broad intellectual diversity among black women, both now and historically, that I tried to capture by highlighting the different kinds of methodologies. So we did one week where we read Kimberly Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins to define the basic terms of contemporary black feminism, especially intersectional and standpoint approaches. Then we spent a week reading Africana womanism. Oye Wumi and Lazreg as represented here take a completely different approach, a completely different methodology than the intersectional and standpoint theories do. Along with Oye Wumi and Lazreg, we also read Carol Boyce-Davies and her black radical approach. And of course, after we read that essay, we spent the next couple of days of class looking at the inspiration for Carol Boyce-Davies, which comes out of the work of Claudia Jones and the women intellectuals of the Black Panther Party. And so here we had a short essay from Toni Kade Babara. Now, in all of this, the purpose was to show that black women have, you know, even if we just take them as a subgroup of all African Senate peoples, we could see that there is no universally shared, you know, paradigm to diagnose the challenges that black women face. But instead, there are all of these different approaches and the intellectual history here is far more rich than if we just chose one black woman intellectual or one black woman's theoretical paradigm to represent everyone of that group. OK, and for this third and final section of the presentation, I'd like to just give an example of the way that I have tried to use open education resources to teach African American philosophy. But there aren't really any OERs in this field, not in primary sources and not in secondary sources like textbooks. So it's a very sparse field. Now, this is a class that I'm constructing for Central State University right now. And so this is a draft. It's a work in progress, but it will illustrate a couple of points. So here, let's take a look at lesson 2.1, pamphleteering as protest in post independence, African American thought. If we go to our assigned text for this lesson, we've got a basic document here. And we have one essay from Absalom Jones and Richard Allen. We've got another essay from Prince Hall, one from James Forton and one from Russell Parrott. Now, in order to piece these together, I had to find them in different places online. So the Jones and Allen piece I was able to find at the Internet Archive. This is a not a sign in book. It's because it is public domain. This book is posted on here for anyone and everyone to read. And so no login is required for this. Other resources that I found at Internet Archive for this class do require a login and a checkout. But this particular one does not. The Prince Hall essay I was able to find at blackpast.org. And if I scroll down here, you can see there's a little introductory clause. And then we have the full text of the piece here. So blackpast.org has been a very important resource in the construction of this class. Next, we have our James Forton essay, which is available at the Gilder-Lariman Institute of American History's website. And so when we come down here, we can see that the full text is available here and has been reproduced. And then finally, we have a resource at Hathi Trust. And this is the Russell Parrott essay here, which is reproduced in PDF in full from its original. So as we can see, if I go back to our assigned texts that for this lesson of the class, I had to find the texts and four different websites to teach these four different texts as part of this lesson. This is going to be one of the challenges for teaching and studying black intellectual history or Africana philosophy in general, or African American philosophy in particular, simply because when you search the standard, regular databases for open education resources, you will find almost nothing that gets this in depth, this in detail in black intellectual history. And this is a real challenge for us today. That wraps it up for my presentation today. I hope that there was at least one thing in here that was helpful for everybody who attended and perhaps more. If you want to get ahold of me and ask me questions, follow up, looking for resources, anything like that, you can reach me at panderson or panderson at centralstate.edu. That's my email address. If you are interested in looking at my work, you can find me on Google Scholar, Fill People or ResearchGate. And of course, if if there's anything I can help with, I would be happy to apply to emails or set up a zoom call or, you know, anything that that might help anybody out. Thanks again, everybody, for coming and take care.